


I Fought The Law

by ArmIa



Category: Streets of Rage (Video Games)
Genre: Corruption, Cynicism, Gen, Idealism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Implied/Referenced Torture, Law Enforcement, Organized Crime, Police Are Useless, dirty cops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25053967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmIa/pseuds/ArmIa
Summary: Axel Stone might be one of the only honest cops in Wood Oak City, but pretty soon he won't even be that.One-shot, set just prior to the first Streets of Rage.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	I Fought The Law

“Thirty-five assaults. Twenty armed robberies. Twelve carjackings. Twenty-nine muggings. Seventeen homicides.”

The Chief doesn’t even look up. He’s noisily slurping his coffee, eyeing his newspaper over the top of it. 

The front page tugs at one’s gaze, demanding your attention. **NO-ONE IS SAFE** screams the headline from atop a photo of a cordoned-off apartment building, the asphalt littered with broken glass while empty window panes sit like open wounds in the flame-blackened brickwork, but The Chief pays it no heed.

He isn’t interested in reading about a 44-year-old woman being robbed in broad daylight, or the 58-year-old liquor store owner who was stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle after refusing to empty the cash register. He’s not interested in a story that ends with a father of four left in a coma in an altercation over the three dollar bus fare in his wallet, or what happened to the young couple who ignored their parents’ warnings not to stay out too late on what was supposed to be their first date, and he certainly isn’t interested in answering the question that’s on the lips of every good, upstanding citizen in Wood Oak City:

_What are the police doing about all this?_

The Chief opts for less depressing fare, focusing on the sports pages and pointedly ignoring anything that might spoil his morning- and that includes Axel Stone.

“There were also fourteen instances classified as hate crimes, including attacks against women, but those are just the ones that were reported to us after the victims were treated for injury,” the rookie cop continues, taking The Chief’s silence as an invitation to press on. 

“Is there a _point_ to all this, Stone?”

Axel takes a deep breath. The Chief takes a huge bite of his donut, one of two that remain out of a box that initially held a dozen, still refusing to meet his subordinate’s gaze.

“Sir, you’ve seen my report regarding the murder of Ken Horowitz?” The question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, but he still wasn’t expecting an answer to it. “His remains were found washed up near the old pier a little over a week ago.”

“So he chose the wrong time of year to go for a swim,” The Chief grumbles through a mouthful of chocolate glazed. “So what?”

“It’s a little hard to swim when your limbs have been bound with a coaxial cable, sir,” Axel observes coldly. “There was also the matter of the numerous injuries associated with blunt force trauma and electrocution, which indicates he was tortured prior to being executed.”

The Chief rolls his eyes, and exhales quietly into his coffee. When he’s finished doing so, his gaze immediately returns to his newspaper. He won’t even dignify his donut box with a look until his grasping fingers locate the last one, his expression shifting from sullen boredom to irritation as he realizes there’s only an old fashioned left. 

After all, nobody likes old fashioned. 

“Stone, either give me a reason to start giving a rat’s ass about what you’re saying or get the hell out of my office.”

“Ken Horowitz was a journalist, sir,” Axel says, delivering the statement so matter-of-factly that he’s almost disappointed by the total lack of a reaction. “He was investigating coordinated attacks on local politicians, including several instances of arson and bomb threats at City Hall.”

 _Incidents that_ _we should’ve been investigating_ , he doesn’t say.

“His body turned up less than two days after publishing an article in the Wood Oak Gazette about these incidents and possible links between local political figures and the Syndicate.”

Only the last word in that sentence is enough to make The Chief look up. He wipes the back of his mouth with a napkin, completely missing the crumbs lingering in the shoe brush mustache sitting on his upper lip, sucks powdered sugar off of his fingers with a wet smacking sound, and points admonishingly at Axel with an index finger that’s shiny with spit.

“I thought I told you already to put all that Syndicate crap out of your mind, Stone.”

Axel’s gaze drifts to the unopened folder of meticulously-compiled intelligence that he and the two other cops in this department that he knows he can trust spent months compiling. He looks back to The Chief, and forces himself to keep his tone level.

“Sir, there is _substantial_ evidence to support the idea that this crime wave isn’t just random incidents, but part of an organized effort by-”

“Crime wave!” the chief snorts, spraying crumbs that settle alongside their fellows across the desk. “You’re in the wrong line of work, Stone. You oughta be writing newspapers, coming out with crap like that. Crime wave…”

He raises his coffee to his lips again, grumbling unintelligibly into the cup. Axel senses an opportunity to speak and seizes it.

“There’s been a sixty percent recorded increase in violent crime over the past month alone, sir, and that curve isn’t leveling out. If anything, it looks to be increasing.”

The Chief sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, what you’re talking about is purely situational, Stone. More than half the time, violent crime is just robberies that have gone bad or an argument that’s turned nasty. The rest is just petty gang disputes over turf. Nothing I’m gonna lose any sleep over.”

It’s the closest he’s come to sounding reasonable since this dialogue started, and for a moment, Officer Axel Stone allows himself to believe that his superior might actually just be a bit of a cynic. He’s been on the force less than a year. His own idealism hasn’t yet been eroded. He can still think of the streets as streets, and not just gutters wide enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. 

“But that’s what I’m saying, sir- that this isn’t just situational. The attacks on journalists and local political figures, people who’ve condemned criminal elements and attempted to raise public awareness of their activities- they’re not random. These are intimidation tactics, and they’re being coordinated by someone.”

“ _Coordinated_ ,” The Chief echoes. Every syllable of that word drips with derision, but Axel presses on.

“Criminal enterprises of this type generally follow similar hierarchies, with lower-ranking criminals being organized in the field by lieutenants who serve a more authoritative figure- someone who’s demonstrated a willingness to get their own hands dirty in the past and commands a degree of respect because of that, but also has the brainpower to back up their muscle, which allows them to forge political and underworld connections. Ken Horowitz had a theory about that too. The article he published made reference to an individual who’s known by the alias _Mr. X_ -”

The Chief’s eyes bulge out of his head like a goldfish, and he chokes on his coffee.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he half-shouts, half-wheezes. “Mr. X doesn’t exist! He’s an urban legend! He’s a goddamn fairy tale that gangbangers use to scare each other around the campfire!”

“Ken Horowitz didn’t seem to think so, and someone killed him for saying it.”

The Chief clears his airway with what’s left of his coffee and slams the mug back down on the table. 

“So let me get this straight,” he growls, smacking his lips contemplatively as he gathers his thoughts. “Not only do you think that a bunch of hoods have decided to form a goddamn fraternity, but you think that they’ve all decided to hold hands and sing kumbaya because- because the goddamn _boogeyman_ told them to? And you’re basing this on- what? The ravings of some hack journo who got hopped up on goofballs and decided to go for a walk off the end of the old pier?”

“Sir, that is _not_ -”

“Save it. I’ve had enough of this crap, you hear me? I’m not entertaining these delusions of yours for one more goddamn minute.”

Axel feels his hands curling into fists at his side, blotches of red standing out against the whitening skin of his knuckles. “ _Delusions?_ Sir, with all due respect-”

“Hang due respect!” The Chief bellows, drowning Axel’s words with his own before dropping his tone back down to a grumble. “You’re a good cop, Stone, but that ain’t even gonna get you a cup of coffee until you learn to be a professional.”

“What’s the point in being a good cop if I can’t even do my job and keep people safe- _sir?_ _”_ Axel demands, adding the honorific as an afterthought. 

“Your job is to follow orders, not go chasing fairy tales,” The Chief spits back at him, irritated by his attitude and being stopped just short of being able to accuse him of insubordination by the addition of the hasty _sir_. “Now, for the last time, put all this Syndicate crap out of your mind until you can show me something beyond circumstantial evidence.”

Axel’s eyes drift to the folder on his desk. A blotchy, brown ring of coffee stands out against the manila cardboard.

“I’ve already submitted two formal requests to have a task force established in order to investigate the Syndicate, sir. Both of them were rejected. Our department might not have the resources to tackle this alone, but at least if we had state or federal support we might have been able to conduct a investigation into-”

“Why the hell would you wanna to involve the feds over this?” The Chief demands. He’s looking at Axel like he’s just dribbled on his loafers. “We take care of our own in this precinct!” 

Axel remembers the looks in the locker room from people who didn’t think he could see them, the whispers behind his back from those who didn’t think he could hear them. He remembers low, indistinct conversations fading to silence as someone nodded at his approach, the way that crowds would disperse around him and the only other two cops in this precinct he’s ever had a conversation with that lasted longer than two sentences.

There are only two cops who didn’t just mumble and excuse to leave or go conveniently deaf whenever he's raised the subject of the Syndicate. They also happen to be two of the only cops in the entire precinct who aren’t white. 

“Doesn’t feel that way, sir.”

The Chief’s expression flickers, then softens a bit as Axel's own boyish features harden. He heaves out a quiet sigh, and loses the accusing snarl for a more diplomatic tone.

“I get it, Stone. You’re young. You’re ambitious. You wanna make a name for yourself. I get it.”

He stares into the depths of his almost-empty coffee cup, watching the soggy crumbs bobbing in the murk as though he's attempting to divine Axel's fortune from them.

“I was just like you once,” The Chief says quietly, as though the words are an admission of guilt. “Then I grew up. Trust me, It’ll make life a helluva lot easier for you once you just accept that there are some things you just can’t control.”

Axel has already made the mistake of thinking The Chief can be reasoned with. He’s convinced himself that he can get through to the man because the alternative just doesn’t bear thinking about. He can’t let this go. He can’t.

“This isn’t about making a name for myself, sir. It’s about doing my job. I didn’t become a cop because I wanted paid vacations and a state pension. I thought I’d be making a difference, keeping people safe. Every case I’ve taken has just hit roadblock after roadblock, and from where I’m standing it’s starting to look like we're the ones putting them up. Every cop in this precinct knows something is rotten in this city, but nobody wants to do anything about it. It feels like- well, to be honest with you, sir, it feels like the cops are as scared of the Syndicate as everyone else is.”

The Chief is silent the whole time, and Axel doesn’t even realize this until the silence persists for lingering seconds after he’s finished talking.

He doesn’t launch into another crumb-spraying tirade, leaning over his desk to roar in Axel’s face about insubordination or idealism or whatever other traits undesirable in a police officer that he thinks he’s displaying. He doesn’t pound the base of his coffee mug into the desk or snort dismissively or roll his eyes. He doesn’t even look angry, really. There’s no vein standing out on his temple, no flaring of his nostrils, no grinding of his teeth.

He just looks…tired.

He exhales quietly into his mustache, tight-lipped, and reaches slowly across his desk to a framed photograph that Axel has never seen from the front. A pudgy thumb runs gently over the glass, and he doesn’t tear his gaze away from whoever is in the frame as he addresses Axel again.

“You wanna be careful about who you go saying stuff like that to, Stone.”

The Chief doesn’t bother to dismiss him. He doesn’t need to. By the time he looks up from the photograph, Axel is gone, and his badge and his gun are laying on the desk.

**Author's Note:**

> Only trust your fists; police will never help you.


End file.
